JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Literature has shown an increase in research relating to autism and ageing, and more specifically autism and healthy ageing. Within the literature there is a clear lack of knowledge and understanding of the impacts of dementia and autism as co-occurring experiences. More specifically, there is a lack of clinical knowledge of the ways in which the cognitive profiles of autism and dementia do, and do not overlap, and how this overlap might affect dementia assessments for this population. This is likely to result in challenges with diagnosis and may lead to misdiagnosis or lack of diagnosis for the autistic population.

Objective:

This paper reports on a narrative literature review which addresses the lack of understanding on potential similarities and differences of cognitive profiles of autistic people and patients with dementia. It aims to identify the cognitive functions that are sensitive only to dementia and not to autism. This will allow for a deeper understanding of how to grant sensitivity and specificity to the assessment of dementia among the autistic population.

Methods:

The narrative literature review relies on existing guidelines (e.g., PRISMA) and a newly develop tool, namely the Quality of Evidence Tool (QoET), to search for publications in relevant databases (e.g., PUBMED, PsycINFO, etc.) which report on cognitive functions in autism. Four main cognitive domains were chosen: memory; executive function; attention; and language as these are the most commonly impaired in people with dementia due to Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and are known to be affected by autism. The QoET was used to select publications that informed us of cognitive functions that would meet our aim i.e., functions affected by dementia and not by autism.

Results:

It is expected that the review will be ready for publication by December 2025

Conclusions:

This review will provide a novel understanding of an under-researched topic. It will provide a robust evidence base to develop a bespoke assessment toolkit for use within the autistic community.